Book Recommendation - Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

I recently bought an audiobook copy of Peter Robison's book Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing.  It's been a fascinating listen so far.  For those unfamiliar with the story, the 737 MAX is the most recent version of the Boeing 737 aircraft.  It was hastily (and some would say haphazardly) developed by the Boeing Company as a competitive response to the introduction of the Airbus A320neo family of commercial passenger aircraft by European aircraft manufacturer Airbus SE.  Airbus is now larger than Boeing and earns more revenue than Boeing, even though Airbus was founded decades after the founding of the Boeing Company.

One of the reasons why Airbus is now bigger and more influential than Boeing is the Boeing 737 MAX.  The various versions of the 737 have all arisen from an initial design that is nearly 60 years old, and which has been stretched and tweaked in order to compete and remain relevant in comparison to Airbus offerings.  In the case of the MAX, one of the modifications involved increasing the size of the engines and placing them far forward on the wings so that the center of gravity of the airplane was shifted relative to earlier versions of the 737.  This led to a natural aerodynamic tendency of the nose of the MAX to pitch upward at unwanted times during certain maneuvers.  Boeing could have responded to this problem by redesigning the aircraft's control surfaces, but Boeing upper management pushed hard to avoid any modifications that might cost money and slow deliveries of the airplane.  So they resorted to a software "fix" in the aircraft flight control computers that would force the nose of the aircraft down in the event that the computer and its sensors determined that the aircraft was about to enter a stall condition.  There were only a few problems with this solution...  One of these problems was that in budget versions of the aircraft, the computer depended on inputs from only one sensor, and if that sensor malfunctioned, the computer could crash the airplane.  Another problem was that when Boeing sold budget versions of the MAX to airlines (especially overseas airlines operating in the developing world), it did not tell pilots or aircraft owners about this software system.  As a result, there were two crashes of the 737 MAX in 2018 and 2019.  All crew and passengers were killed.  (One other thing to note: this year, in 2024, an emergency exit plug blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in flight, resulting in an explosive decompression and an emergency landing at Portland International Airport.)

One might ask how such a state of affairs was allowed to develop in an American company that used to be the epitome of American innovation and technological advancement.  Peter Robison's book describes how at the beginning of the jet age, Boeing became focused on being the best, most technically advanced aircraft manufacturer in the world, obsessed with pushing the envelope of aircraft design to produce the world's most advanced and capable passenger aircraft.  For instance, the Boeing 747 was the company's proudest achievement of the 20th century.  But all that changed when Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, with the result that the focus of the Boeing company became maximizing shareholder value, revenue, and stock price while minimizing costs.  Thus over the next three decades the Boeing Company began to resemble a once proud, strong ox or bull being eaten from the inside by tapeworms.

Robison's Flying Blind is a gripping, exciting, emotive expansion and elaboration of a theme which was touched on briefly in the third chapter of a much drier and more stuffy academic book which I listened to back in 2022, namely, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, by John Kay.  In that third chapter, titled "The Profit-Seeking Paradox: How The Most Profitable Companies Are Not The Most Profit-Oriented," Kay tells the story of a few well-known, formerly powerful companies which, to use my own words, began with the main goal to "do beautifully good work in order to meet necessary needs".  As they got really, really good at doing that kind of work, they naturally began to earn lots of money.  But as soon as they shifted their focus from being primarily about doing beautifully good work to making lots of money, they began to destroy themselves.  If you decide to read the book, note that Kay specifically mentions Boeing in this chapter.

Yet this is the character of almost all of American late capitalism in 2024.  This is also the economic philosophy pushed by all of the media outlets of the American Right.  This is not only leading to the hollowing-out of once-iconic American businesses by rich parasites, but is also contributing to the precarity and inequality that define American society at this time.  I can't help but think that this is going to end badly for the parasites at the top.